I have installed 12.04 LTS but surprisingly not able to login as root. I have unlock and set the password for root but while login i can not see 'other' option in GUI login where i can put root id and password.

6 Answers
6

I store my home directory in lvm and occasionally need to unmount it to perform maintenance. It's much more convenient to login as root in those circumstances, as I can look up documentation online and browse the web while waiting for fsck.

By default, Ubuntu's greeter LightDM no longer supports logging in with an arbitrary username as it did in the past.

But this is still Linux, and we can configure this. Edit /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf with root privileges and add this line:

As far as I know you can't login as root at the GUI login screen and it would be a bad idea anyway. Juan's answer is correct - you can launch a terminal and sudo su to root user (if you are in the sudoers group) and then launch a program which uses a GUI if you wish.

this option was available till 11.10..is it not available in 12.04?
–
TapasApr 27 '12 at 16:50

I used 11.10 for a long time and never realized that was possible. I see from this site: [blog.sudobits.com/2011/09/05/… that it was. I really don't want to test that on my current system it seems like a terrible security risk.
–
in8sworldMay 1 '12 at 15:54

This is not possible (without a lot of work manually overriding stuff) because it is pretty much always a bad idea.

In this question, there is a good discussion about the many things that can go wrong if you log in as root. Many things won't work at all. Other things won't work as expected. If you do anything wrong, you could destroy all the data on your computer. It makes your computer more vulnerable than windows to malicious attacks.

In all cases I've ever heard of, when a person is asking how to log in as root, they are trying to log in as root to accomplish something that could be better done without logging in as root.

As such, I recommend editing the question to ask how do best accomplish whatever you are actually trying to accomplish. We'd be happy to help you get to your goals :)

thanks...well while installation i created 3 partition /,/home,/swap...now after installation i can not see /home...i can see home folder under / but cant see /home drive or directory.
–
TapasApr 27 '12 at 18:06

@Tapas If you have just recently installed, the easiest way to fix this would be to simply install from scratch. However, if you do already have files you want to save, boot from the CD (or DVD or flash drive) you used for the installation. From there, you should be able to fix whatever is broken. (If you need more help fixing the partition, I'd recommend putting in a new question - I don't know enough to help with that)
–
David OneillApr 27 '12 at 18:39

Not everyone who wants to do this is a noob. My /home is located on an lvm partition, and when I unmount it to do maintenance I would login as root so I could use tabbed terminals, and pull up documentation in a browser.
–
Adam LassekMay 3 '12 at 2:14

To actually enable root logins, first you have to set a password for the root account, and then unlock the locked root account.
If you don't set a password for the root account the passwd command will return

`passwd: Unlocking the password would result in a passwordless account`

So, first execute in a terminal

sudo passwd root

you will prompted for a new Unix password. Write it twice(second for confirmation).

Then execute

sudo passwd -u root

to unlock the account. This should return

passwd: password expiry information changed

Reverting back

If you want to disable root account in Ubuntu you need to lock the root account by using the following command sudo passwd -l root